December 11, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Funding Fathers: The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement
by Nicole Hoplin and Ron Robinson
The stories of the donors who helped build organizations that have been key to advancing the conservative movement are all too often ignored by the news media, or cloaked in secrecy by donors who request anonymity, write Ron Robinson, president of Young America’s Foundation, in Herndon, Va., and Nicole Hoplin, director of foundation relations for the same group.
The authors chose to highlight 12 of the conservative movement’s “funding fathers,” in part to encourage other conservatives to donate big gifts as well. “Keeping the most important gifts made in obscurity hinders the movement’s ability to create a magnetic field for its future,” they write. “These tremendous funding fathers and their stories are the movement’s magnets, attracting those who aren’t sure about making a major sacrifice to provide an investment on behalf of their values and America’s future.”
The chapters include history and anecdotes about men such as Antony Fisher, who began as a farmer and later became an investor and entrepreneur. He founded the educational charity Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank, in London in 1955.
Another chapter profiles Gerald (Spike) Hennessy, a drugstore owner and alumnus of Hillsdale College, in Michigan, who made large donations to keep the college operating when it faced financial difficulties in the 1950s. As a board member, he was a key figure in the college’s refusal to accept federal money in 1962, thereby becoming independent of the government, write the authors.
Publisher: Regnery Publishing, 1 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001; (202) 216-0600; fax (202) 216-0612; orderentry@cdsbooks.com; http://www.regnery.com; 248 pages; $27.95; ISBN 978-1-59698-562-9.
